Learn to speak Italian in four easy decades

OUR new Italian teacher tells us grammar is for life. He's a stickler for correct nomenclature as well as endless exercises, a throwback to an earlier age and a reminder there are two kinds of people: those who get off on a predicate nominative and those who do not.

The charms of the imperfect subjunctive are lost on many of us who must still on occasion silently recite that little memory trick the nuns taught us in primary school before being absolutely, positively certain that it's "you and I" not "you and me".

Thus, after decades of studying a foreign language via lazy engagement with the direct method of conversation; learning by osmosis; and a "near enough is good enough as long as you can make yourself understood at the train station" approach, being forced to come clean on your irregular verb endings is a bit of a shock. But just like solving the last clue in the crossword, or getting the Rubik's cube to line up, there can be a strange pleasure in retrieving the correct prepositional phrase from the memory bank while mid-sentence.

Years of swotting French vocab on the school bus should have warned us that there is no short cut to learning a foreign language. But impressed by the millions across the world who seemed to have learned a second language - English - from the street and more recently from YouTube, it has been easy to cling to the notion that immersion will do the trick. After all, some people learn English just by up picking a tennis racquet, do not they?

A stack of Italian textbooks purchased during the past four decades testifies to this dream. Pre-1985, the books have precise explanations, in English, of the points of grammar, with no quarter given when it comes to deconstructing and naming the parts of the whole. Those purchased in the past 25 years are a mix of conversational exercises, material to use with audiotapes and an optimistic belief we all have an ear for language and a photographic memory. The books are a mud-map of pedagogy in the past 40 years, from grammar as king to grammar as irritating irrelevance. We've known for a while now how destructive that has proved for many of our kids as they learn to read, write and spell in English.

Now I'm wondering whether I can blame the absence of the gerund for my failure of fluency for 40 years. Ah well, back to the grammar crammer.